3.x

Greyscale (monochrome) shader

Problem

You want a shader to convert an image to greyscale.

Solution

Let’s start with a canvas_item (2D) shader. To convert to greyscale but also preserve pixel contrast, we need to average the pixel’s color value. Add the color channels together and divide by 3:

shader_type canvas_item;

void fragment() {
    COLOR = texture(TEXTURE, UV);
    float avg = (COLOR.r + COLOR.g + COLOR.b) / 3.0;
    COLOR.rgb = vec3(avg);
}

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You can apply this to the whole screen by adding a ColorRect (placed in a CanvasLayer to ignore camera movement) and scaling it to cover the screen.

Change the texture() function to sample the screen instead of the object’s pixels:

COLOR = texture(SCREEN_TEXTURE, SCREEN_UV);

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